Diversity and distribution of begomoviruses infecting tomato in India

Abstract

Leaf curl begomoviruses cause serious yield losses to Indian tomato crops. Total DNAs were extracted from leaves of 69 tomato plants and 34 weeds or neighbouring crops collected from all the major tomato producing areas of India. Eighty-one of the 103 samples were positive by PCRs using begomovirus genus-specific primers. Coat protein (CP) genes from 29 samples were PCR amplified, cloned and sequenced. Phylogenetic analyses of the CP sequences revealed five different tomato leaf curl begomovirus (TLCB) clusters each